Commentary: The writing's on the wall for Bates's empire

THE official news from Chelsea's website is sponsored by 'Nivea for Men'. So we can only hope that there was nothing cosmetic about Ken Bates's Orwellian attack on his critics this week: "The future is the opposite of what's being portrayed."

THE official news from Chelsea's website is sponsored by 'Nivea for Men'. So we can only hope that there was nothing cosmetic about Ken Bates's Orwellian attack on his critics this week: "The future is the opposite of what's being portrayed."

Even as his team prepare to face Coventry today, squads of language professors are probably trying to translate Bates's robust rebuttal for the benefit of Claudio Ranieri, the non-English speaking coach who is having to converse with the Chelsea players by tic-tac, phrases out of a Berlitz guide and Steve Martin's repertoire of facial expressions.

Ranieri, who is apparently working his way with immense patience past tactical questions such as, "which way is the post office?", has removed yet another native speaker by sending the Scotland Under-21 defender, Warren Cummings, to Bournemouth on a month's loan.

Cummings's temporary move follows that of Jon Harley, the England Under-21 left back lent to Wimbledon, where he will be well coached by Terry Burton but will have to get used to hanging his coat next to John Hartson instead of Gianfranco Zola.

Harley was dispatched not long after Chelsea put a tick on their international shopping list by signing Slavisa Jokanovic from Yugoslavia via Spain, and on the same day that Bates went on the offensive against those who argue that Chelsea Village is like a wedding cake placed too near to a roaring fire.

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So it all adds up doesn't it? The club is losing money, the coach can't speak to the players, the British lads can't get a kick, the team are in 15th place in the Premiership and Nivea for Men have found themselves sponsoring an endless sequence of bad news.

Forgive me for rejecting all the evidence to the contrary, but Chelsea seem a long way away from turning back into the "playboy club, the cowboy club," that Bates insists he inherited in 1982.

Such is the volatility of the Premiership that a few bad results (on and off the pitch) and a seemingly misguided managerial appointment prompt everybody to believe that they have just seen the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding across the pitch.

Thank goodness for Sir Alex Ferguson and his suggestion that Dwight Yorke lock the revolving door of his love life and find a nice lassie with whom to settle down. The Football Association also upheld a tradition this week by ruling Terry Venables out of the England job by way of a nudge-nudge, wink-wink statement borrowed from a Carry On film.

Reading between the lines was never a requirement with Bates, who reminds you of an old colonel blasting away at mice with a blunderbuss. The Chelsea chairman pulled the trigger again when the club's accounts showed a pre-tax loss of £3.4 million and a transfer deficit of £31 million since May 1998. "We've got £44 million in the bank we don't know what to do with," said blaster Bates, firing another volley of shot Fleet Street's way. "If that's a crisis I wish we had that every year. These stories are typical of sports journalists becoming financial experts."

A couple of years back, a prominent Premiership manager said to me: "The sums at Chelsea just don't add up." He meant the wages, the transfer fees, the enormous investments required to make Chelsea Village a city state (two hotels, five restaurants and so on). But they certainly do make sense in the context of what Stamford Bridge was like in the early 1980s, when the club was losing £12,000 a week and even the rat-catcher was pouring Champagne on his breakfast cereal.

The real story of the Chelsea Village miracle is probably a lot more complex than we know, but for now the lopsidedness is not so much financial as cultural.

Bates maintains that television revenues will rise from £8 million to £25-30 million next season, and that the completion of the West Stand will add another 7,000 seats, thus eliminating the small cash-flow problem.

No, the charges that stick are those of promiscuity in the transfer market, disloyalty to youth and wild gambling with the appointment of Ranieri, who yesterday urged his players to "fight for every ball". Through his interpreter, of course.

Managers often resort to this kind of chest-beating, but not so often after only four games in charge.

Maybe Ranieri has just been quicker than Gianluca Vialli to spot the obvious flaw in the great pan-national experiment at Stamford Bridge: the star culture it encourages, and the obvious application deficit it creates on the Premiership's traditional battlegrounds.

It also took Ranieri just four games to send the club's most promising young English player to Wimbledon, which sent out the worst message of the week.

We ought to have known that Bates would go Roman after Glenn Hoddle, Ruud Gullit and Vialli. The writing was on the wall - near the main reception desk at Stamford Bridge, where the following exhortation greets the staff: "The Romans didn't build a great empire by organising meetings. They did it by killing anyone who got in their way." That slogan was not brought to you by Nivea for Men.